Heads Up

Ready for this? A chip, a tiny computer chip. Add a computer to your brain

Keeping our antenna tuned to the latest in digibod connectivity, our team ventured to “Silicon Valley South” last week.

We drove by a new start up named Kernal in Venice, a canal-laced, seaside version of the original that’s turning this part of west Los Angeles/Playa Vista into a “Silicon Beach”. The area is an exploding IT-focused development that’s attraced a nexus of tech companies like Google, Facebook/ICANN, YouTube, Microsoft and Yahoo, Electronic Arts, USC Creative Technology Institute, Belkin and many more large, medium and small companies that are adding another hub to the digital era.

Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti has made technology a top priority and has been lobbying companies in Northern California to come south. Well, his lobbying worked. The results are more than impressive, a mix of new housing, offices, development, digital tech and a who’s who and up-and-comers in technology that have been brought together amidst Los Angeles traffic and within shouting distance of Marina del Reys yachts and the beaches of Venice and Santa Monica.

Tucked into this crush of technology and traffic is one company that stood out to us as worth taking a closer look. So we traveled to the Westside of LA and navigated past the searchers for Pokemon.

Kernal: Getting to Know You

VENICE BEACH, Calif. — Like many in Silicon Valley, technology entrepreneur Bryan Johnson sees a future in which intelligent machines can do things like drive cars on their own and anticipate our needs before we ask.

What’s uncommon is how Johnson wants to respond: find a way to supercharge the human brain so that we can keep up with the machines.

From an unassuming office in Venice Beach, his science-fiction-meets-science start-up, Kernel, is building a tiny chip that can be implanted in the brain to help people suffering from neurological damage caused by strokes, Alzheimer’s or concussions. Top neuroscientists who are building the chip — they call it a neuroprosthetic — hope that in the longer term, it will be able to boost intelligence, memory and other cognitive tasks.